Former Google Driverless Car Pioneer Says Autonomy Has Finally Arrived

When I covered Google a decade ago, the company’s driverless car project was a hot topic. Every time the press gathered, project lead Chris Urmson stepped up to answer questions.

Most of us journalists were desperately trying to learn the key technical details on the fly, so we often resorted to the same question that we hoped would yield an interesting story: “When will cars be fully autonomous?”

Urmson always did his best to answer, without committing Google to unrealistic timelines. After a while, he lost his patience or grew bored. One day in 2015, he made a joke, or rather, a combination of a joke and a fun prediction.

Urmson said his son might never need a driver’s license because autonomous cars would be widely available by the time the kid got to driving age. We all wrote that up, and the prediction became autonomous lore: Driverless cars everywhere by 2020!

It didn’t happen by then, and the autonomous vehicle sector slipped into a bit of funk. But I always remembered Urmson’s quip about his son. So, when I ran into the executive at a Goldman Sachs conference earlier this year, I asked what his kid was up to.

It turns out Urmson has two children. They’re well into driving age and they both got licenses. Now though, a decade after that joke-prediction, Urmson is finally ready to declare victory: autonomous vehicles are here and they’re working.

“It’s exciting. I’ve been at this for a while, and it’s one of these things where you’re like, ‘Will it? Won’t it” for a while and then you get to ‘this is going to happen, but exactly when,'” he said. “It’s kind of neat to be in the place where it’s happened.”

A long road to self-driving cars

It’s been a long road for one of the pioneers of driverless vehicles. In 2007, when Urmson was a professor at Carnegie Mellon, he was a member of one of the earliest groups to build a robot car as part of a DARPA Grand Challenge. That’s how he ended up at Google, a position he held until 2016. A year later, he cofounded Aurora Innovation, a company that develops autonomous trucking technology.

On Tuesday, Aurora announced a gaggle of gains that show why Urmson is now confident that autonomous vehicles have truly arrived.

The company said its driverless trucking operations are expanding to a new Fort Worth-El Paso route, a 600 mile journey that takes human truckers 9 to 10 hours to complete. The expansion happened roughly six months after Aurora’s commercial driverless launch, one of the fastest deployments in the industry to date.

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Urmson said Aurora’s autonomous skills transferred to a brand-new area pretty seamlessly, showing how this technology can learn to adapt to new environments. That’s a key part of the promise of driverless vehicles, and AI in general.

“Those skills transfer, and so each time we open a new lane, it gets easier and easier,” Urmson said. “It’s good when the thesis that you’ve been building around works out after 20 years of work.”

Aurora also announced on Tuesday that its trucks have driven 100,000 driverless miles with perfect on-time and safety records. Next year, the company plans to deploy hundreds of trucks without human observers once it completes safety validation on trucks from Volvo and Navistar.

Aurora’s new next-generation hardware, featuring its proprietary FirstLight lidar, can detect objects a full kilometer away, the company also said.

Aurora uses ‘verifiable AI’

Aurora relies on what Urmson calls “verifiable AI,” a system that explicitly models cars, pedestrians, and lanes to ensure decisions are grounded in real-world logic.

Aurora wants to ensure that its autonomous systems actually express and understand the concepts that matter to driving, Urmson said.

“We want to make sure that when the part that’s thinking about how to move through the world thinks about that, it’s explicitly thinking about cars and pedestrians and cyclists and lane geometry,” he added. “That whatever actions it’s taking are actually based on that, rather than some other imagined reason that it’s come to the conclusion that it should do this.

From TaaS to DaaS

Aurora operates as a transportation-as-a-service (TaaS) provider, hauling freight for major carriers such as Werner and Schneider. Over time, customers will buy trucks equipped with the Aurora Driver and buy a license from the company. “Driver-as-a-service,” as Urmson puts it (or DaaS).

The company says autonomous trucks can cut driver costs, improve fuel efficiency, and eliminate turnover costs in an industry with high employee turnover. Driving at 65 mph (as Aurora trucks do), instead of 75, also saves thousands of gallons of diesel a year, reducing emissions and expenses.

After years of hype, setbacks, and skepticism, Urmson says the age of driverless transport has finally begun.

“It’s just exciting to see us go from telling the story of what it could do to being able to tell the story of what it is doing,” Urmson said.

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